A Call for Constructive Engagement

Courageous inquiry, deep learning, and respectful dialogue. It is what our students deserve, and it is what our democracy requires.

The Call for Constructive Engagement.

The Power of Breakfast

This morning I'm thinking about the Black Panther's Free Breakfast Program and the ways in which a single community center focused on meeting basic needs of residents was radical, and the conditions were so unequal that the program became radicalizing.

Volunteers would start setting up and preparing food around 6 am, and served the meal from 7-8:30. Most programs took place in churches, schools, or community centers. A typical breakfast often included some combination of bacon, eggs, grits, hotcakes, toast, sausage, and a glass of juice or milk. Various chapters would also provide transportation for children, from home to the chapter's Free Breakfast site, then to school.

Collective Nouns

A brunch of Millennials
A kaleidoscope of butterflies
A Presence of activists
A flamboyance of flamingoes
A cast of Falcons
A convocation of eagles
A coalition of cheetahs
A rake of colts
A glaring of cats
A sleuth of bears
A shrewdness of Apes

No One Is Above the Law

The Rule of Law is being shredded.
We are in a constitutional crisis.
I am not going to sit quietly by, tsk-tsking and wishing someone would do something.

Progressive Era, 21st Century Version

Never underestimate the power of women who can protest while wearing a skirt and marching in heels.

See you at the rally at Elmwood Park.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Eclipse Season, part one

What a week we have had: threats of nuclear war in Southeast Asia were actually eclipsed by torch-bearing white nationalists on the Lawn and a hate-filled murderous ramming. It can be hard to see the light, indeed.

I'm glad that I opted not to attend the ministry gathering in Charlottesville on Saturday. Don't expect this to mean that I tolerate nationalism or that I will in any way be quiet about it. I won't.

Far closer to home, there has been much activity as well, no less revealing. The workshop in Richmond was excellent and continues to confirm that this is the path that is opening for me. Love and compassion are our greatest gifts, and through them I continue to find my greatest joy and action. The companionship of Friends in Richmond was replenishing, a deep drink of a clear stream. I am blessed to have crossed paths and look forward to doing so again in the not-so-distant future.

There has been less glamorous work, too. Sweeping up the dust, clearing out the rubbish, straightening the edges, emptying the bins, signing the paperwork -- it all needs doing, and even a little effort seems to reveal much for me this month. I'm not even really all that upset to be doing the chore-some work of it all.

Love and comfort are hard to come by these days, it seems. Nurturing and connection are basic, human and necessary. If there is little now, there is one thing I know to be true beyond all else: now is not always. 

Today is now; tomorrow beacons.

Intuitively minded

Charlottesville is about 90 miles from my front door, and is in-between my front door and Richmond, where the mediation workshop was being held. I had several different invitations to consider: peace stance with ministers, civil disobedience workshop, giving a talk about the concept of White Genocide and what it means for peace activists and civil rights today, the reality of free speech and free assembly protections -- all sorts of cool, instructional, compassionate activities. And I had every intention of going. As I gathered my things up Friday night, I felt a strong sense that this was not a good idea, and, despite feeling a bit foolish, I brought my bags back in the house and decided to wait until the very early morning to make up my mind about the event. Pictures of torches on the lawn didn't sway me, but left me feeling even more drawn to say "This is not my voice; you do not speak for me." But again, I had foreboding as I turned the key in the ignition. Again, I stayed home, sheepishly schlepping my bags up the stairs to the living room. By ten-thirty, the only thing I wanted was a nap, and I started to read and write a bit.

By the time I resurfaced into the Known World around 3:30 in the afternoon, I was glad I had stayed home, and began the texts and calls that would take up the rest of the evening, verifying the safety of the others that I had known were going, checking in with the Friends network and the activists, ministers, and community that I have come to think of as my family. We were all well, though understandably rattled in varying degrees. I daresay that each of us has felt this weekend as a watershed event emotionally, and it might take a bit to see the impact that it has on each of us personally, on us as groups, and on us as a nation.

Even if

So even if someone is beating you, knocking you down, even if you’re down on the ground trying to protect your head, you try to maintain eye contact. Let the person who’s trying to hurt you see your humanity.
----John Lewis

In the Shadow of the Hill

My first thoughts as I watched the film were that favela life was culturally rich even if it was possession- and cash-poor before the drug lords came in. As we watch the scenes unfold, it is this richness of connection and community that holds the narrative and refuses to give up, showing a resilience in the face of oppression, violence and vilification that cannot be silenced and that, eventually, overcomes injustice.

Rio de Janeiro didn’t care about how the traffickers’ hostile occupation of the favelas affected the disenfranchised residents in the impoverished favelas, despite having a thriving community. Rocinha was especially disrupted by the traffickers, but equally especially ignored by the politicians. The ‘favela problem’ wasn’t seen by the politicians until the city was awarded the honor of hosting the 2014 Olympics, and then the government saw the favelas, but saw them as a problem to be eradicated, by force if necessary. The favelas were seen as troubling not because of the disenfranchisement, racism or unrelenting poverty and poor housing conditions, but because of the need to assure the Olympic Committee and the global tourists who would soon be visiting that the city of Rio was safe and clean, two things the city government held that the favelas distinctly were not. The trafficker-controlled favelas, Rocinha the largest amongst them, stood as a direct counterpoint to the image and narrative that Brazil and Rio were showing the world.

I find it interesting that the government policy to address this undesirable element to be that of “pacification,” the overrunning of the favelas by force with guns and armor. This annexation of the favelas through martial law was an extreme response, one that reflects the government’s comfort with the use of threat and intimidation through a police state in the middle of the city. The residents are treated little better than animals. Early in the film, we see a man in a suit walking in Rocinha, heavily-armed and armor-clad officers at every turn warning him of the folly. He saunters casually through the lovely sun-drenched day, pointing out bullet holes in the murals, his nonchalance its own protest against the fear that the officers are peddling.

The rebellion of Rocinha is brutal and inspiring in equal measure. The injustices rained down upon the slum residents reflect their second class status, showing the Brazilian government’s priority of joining the global cities ranks over the safety and community of its local Rio citizens, even if they be poor or black. Power corrupts; Money corrupts; guns corrupt; the combination in Rocinha leads to an explosion of the poor against the government who would eradicate them altogether.

The protests began around a single missing man, but quickly become the voice of the power of community even in communities without power. Through creativity and organization, Rocinha citizens stand up, push back, and claim their right to live, even in a favela. They refuse to be silent despite threats of violence and vilification by the press. They engage a wider audience by taking their outrage to the internet, adding the government’s attempts to silence them to their listed complaints. Change comes, eventually, in a real and meaningful way. Michelle Lacerda says that “Twenty years ago, a black favela resident would have deserved their death in the eyes of the public, but not today.”

It is the eyes of the public, the very global perspective that Rio and by extension Brazil want to claim, that brings the justice to the community. The world stage backed the protesters, making it more than an outcry and transforming the organized resistance into real empowerment. Through exposure, their plight became real and the residents became seen. While we are all aghast at the government and its abuses, we rejoice with Lacerda when she says, “There is justice in this country. It’s slow, complicated and sometimes corrupt. But it exists.”

Class Struggle, the City, and the Willing Worker

David Harvey presents a lovely picture of the unique framework that cities present to enact a recreation of ourselves through our cities, a rebirth that reflects who we are in terms of our interactions and our values. This rebirth, he holds, is a right, a “common rather than individual right,” and  “one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”1,2

Harvey holds that cities are predicated on the “concentrations of surplus product,” a dead giveaway to his Marxist underpinnings, and to a point I agree with him. I certainly stand with his identification of urbanization as a “class phenomenon.”3 But I’m not certain I can join him when he identifies the mechanism of classist interactions and control to be that of control of distribution of that surplus. While he is right that control lies in the hands of the few and affects the lives of many, there is something else going on here, and it’s not only about urbanization, though -- we have brought this forward since medieval times: control of access to avenues of power.

The focus on control over the distribution of surplus as the hallmark of class issues misses the mark a bit and is, to my mind, a bit short-sighted in that it focuses specifically on the more modern human collective expression of urbanization. I find that control of distribution is but one piece, and a relatively new one given that there is a surplus, but that since the Middle Ages we have, as a Western Society certainly, held control of inclusion, of access to avenues of power, as the hallmark of class struggle. As Western society has become cash-based and production-oriented over the last half-millennium, the tools that bestow power and legitimacy have shifted, but the desire to control access to them has gotten fiercer than ever.

By limiting and controlling access, the class itself is protected and nurtured, insulated from the shock of social change that seems to explode on the scene more frequently than ever before. This insulation also protects the ruling class from having to worry about competition, at least in the near term, as exclusion has long been used to mitigate the pressures that competition or scarcity of resources -- natural, labor, or production -- can create for production and management of wealth, with as money or as social capital.

Harvey does identify the role of the state in promoting an unlevel playing field in the realm of competition, certainly.  But he doesn’t seem to identify the role that we, the workers, are having in shaping a corporate reality through working for what are more and more often corporate cities. Corporations are creating and maintaining their bottom line through the creation of corporate cities -- controlling the labor force and the municipality in which they operate in order to reap the mega-profits that are available in the twenty-first century economy, whether mining diamonds or data.

Class organization as a social justice tool is only as good as the pressures workers feel; it has been said by more than one labor attorney that the way to prevent workers from organizing is to treat them well. If the current workforce isn’t desperate for better wages and conditions, then organization and the change that Harvey identifies all die on the vine. We of the white collar, no less yoked and caged, are willingly eschewing organization in trade for coffee bars and game-stocked employee lounges, ignoring the social ills that are perpetuated outside the halls of our air-conditioned, gym-sporting office complexes. Our youth-driven greed is being stoked by corporate America, a small price for producers to pay to avoid the costs of really dealing with the inequality that persists and grows, largely in direct proportion to the white-collar, high-tech workforce and what it produces.

1. Harvey, David, “The Right to City,” New Left Review 53, Sept-Oct 2008, p. 23.

2. Please note: I am a utilitarian. I do not discuss rights this way, but I certainly allow others to do so and can follow the line of reasoning from this point of origin. For more on my perspective of responsibilities instead of rights, contact me and we will hold a symposium; there just aren’t enough symposia these days. 3. Harvey, David, “The Right to City,” New Left Review 53, Sept-Oct 2008, p. 24.

Philippines closing the mines and not even apologizing

NPR had an interview with Philippines Environmental Secretary Gina Lopez today, who shocked world markets by announcing the closure of 23 mines due to environmental concerns. The Philippines, the world's largest source for minerals, including tech-important nickel, is drowning under the global needs of minerals and is paying a heavy cost in resources, human as well as natural. Lopez nixed a proposal from Nickelodeon's parent company, Viacom, for an underwater theme park off the eco-friendly island of Palawan.

Hello, 400 hectares of underwater theme park - you're going to kill our environment, man. You know, people with money, they come in, and then they just do things. Like, the world is not here for you to rape.

Radio Free Roanoke Benefit

We went to the benefit for Radio Free Roanoke and had a smashing time. The bands were excellent, the people were fantastic, the ideas were big. A huge shout out goes to Corbin for hosting the event and to Alexis for coordinating it all - they really made it happen! I'm looking forward to working with them both in the future for benefits for other Roanoke gems.

I also got to catch up with Polly from Ploughshares - she and I have been running into each other for over twenty years. It was good to catch up. A good time was had by all.